War Without Rules Chinas Playbook for Global Domination (Robert Spalding) (z-lib.org)

Their suggestion to modify “the current principles of war” is much
more than a simple shift in tactics, as had happened many times across
military history. For instance, George Washington’s forces during the
Revolutionary War introduced guerrilla warfare against lined formations,
and war was never the same after that. But the concept of unrestricted
warfare goes much further, changing the definition of who fights and
bringing civilians irrevocably into the battle.

Today, why not replicate the Mogadishu incident by moving some of
your own civilians into war zones whenever a Western power was planning
airstrikes? That would lead to CNN and the internet spreading images of
slaughtered innocents. International outrage and condemnation would
almost certainly fall on the military force that dropped the bombs on those
civilians, not the cold-blooded government that put them in the line of fire
to trigger atrocities. The result would be a huge, asymmetric advantage for
any ruthless country willing to throw out the Geneva Conventions and other
standards of ethical warfare.

American military strategists and political leaders were nowhere close
to this analysis in 1999—in fact, they’re still resisting it two decades later.
Recent books like The Kill Chain by Christian Brose are still focused on
making our military more effective at blowing things up, using cutting-edge
technology to identify and hit targets more accurately and quickly. But this
approach misses the point. Efficiency doesn’t matter if the real war is being
conducted without blowing anyone up. In 2021, we still lack the clarity and
insight that the authors of UW had in 1999.

—

So much of the power of technology is tied to information and the question
of who controls that information. The most sophisticated generals have
always understood the importance of information in warfare. It’s often said
that truth is the first casualty of war, and even democratic societies have
sometimes lied to the public, such as the United States in both world wars.
But democracy is so far not the Chinese way and harsh control of the media
has been a hallmark of the CCP, starting with the Great Firewall. Launched

in the wake of Unrestricted Warfare, the firewall is meant to block almost
all Western media, particularly internet sources such as Google and
Facebook, as well as news providers such as The New York Times and The
Washington Post.

That desire for control has led to the creation of a literal army of
Chinese citizens engaged in cyberwar, policing the internet, creating false
propaganda on social media, and stealing the next generation of technology.
As discussed in the next chapter, all this and more are weapons of war. And
weapons the United States has conveniently ignored for many years.

CHAPTER 4

THE WEAPONS REVOLUTION

IN JANUARY 2018, MARRIOTT INTERNATIONAL, THE GIANT HO
employee named Roy Jones. An American social media manager for
Marriott, he had “liked” a Tweet from a Tibetan independence group that
seemed to imply that Tibet was separate from China. Someone in the
Shanghai tourism bureau, spotted Jones’s Tweet and reported it to the CCP.
For the thought crime of liking the Tweet, the CCP expressed its outrage to
Marriott, which manages many hotels in China. Marriott fired Jones.

A bizarrely petty move, one might think, but also an important one,
because it gives us a glimpse of China acting on an idea from Chapter 1 of
Unrestricted Warfare. China was able to control a massive corporation’s
behavior outside of China by using what President Xi Jinping calls his
“magic weapon”: the use of information technology along with China’s
primary resource: people (and because Marriott owns hotels in China).

For thousands of years, up through the nuclear age, humans have
labeled eras of warfare according to the dominant weapons technology of
the time. But the new concept of unrestricted warfare makes that kind of
language obsolete. We can’t even call this the nuclear age anymore, as Qiao
and Wang will explain shortly. It’s time to fundamentally rethink warfare,
and while naming conventions might seem trivial, names greatly affect how
we process new ideas.

In 1998, when Unrestricted Warfare was written, China did not have
stealth bombers or an adequate navy. But in the view of the colonels, it had
many weapons: It had more than a billion people. It had computer
programmers and devious hackers pouring out of universities each year. It
had financial speculators and currency reserves. It had doctors studying
lethal viruses. All, and more, should be considered weapons. While their
enemies would be spending money on guns, China would be buying and
building computer chips—and everything else.

The ships and planes of other nations, worth hundreds of billions of
dollars and needing constant upgrades, were meant to fight the last war.
What China has is suited to the next one.

In this chapter, we’ll look at how the colonels recommend the
weaponizing of everything. We’ll look at their belief that swollen military
budgets are actually destructive to the spender. And we’ll consider what to
make of China’s current explosion of military spending, considering the
strategy they’ve held to date. Does this insight allow us to glimpse a change
in strategy? Is China girding for a conventional conflict? Or is this a
Potemkin ruse to goad the United States into spending more?

The colonels also focus on another kind of weapon: a commercial
airliner. Written before the 9/11 attacks, the colonels nonetheless predict
something like that will occur. They write: Everything that can benefit
mankind can also harm him. This is to say that there is nothing in the world
today that cannot become a weapon. Such as a commercial jetliner loaded
with fuel.

From Chapter 1 of Unrestricted Warfare

The weapons revolution invariably precedes the revolution in military
affairs by one step, and following the arrival of a revolutionary weapon, the
arrival of a revolution in military affairs is just a matter of time. The history
of warfare is continually providing this kind of proof: bronze or iron spears
resulted in the infantry phalanx; bows and arrows and stirrups provided
new tactics for cavalry. Black powder cannons gave rise to a full
complement of modern warfare modes. . . . From the time when conical
bullets and rifles took to the battlefield as the vanguard of the age of
technology, weapons straightaway stamped their names on the chest of
warfare.

First, it was the enormous steel-clad naval vessels that ruled the seas,
launching the “age of battleships,” then its brother the “tank” ruled land
warfare, after which the airplane dominated the skies, up until the atomic
bomb was born, announcing the approach of the “nuclear age.” Today, a
multitude of new and advanced technology weapons continues to pour
forth. . . . [People are] calling it “electronic warfare,” “precision-weapons
warfare,” and “information warfare.” Coasting along in their mental orbit,
people have not yet noticed that a certain inconspicuous yet very important
change is stealthily approaching.

The authors are urging readers to make a fundamental shift in mindset
about how we think about war.

NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO LABEL WARFARE

. . . What is different than in the past is that the revolution in military affairs
that is coming will no longer be driven by one or two individual
weapons. . . . In the past, all that was needed was the invention of a few
weapons or pieces of equipment, such as the stirrup and the Maxim
machine gun, and that was sufficient to alter the form of war, whereas today
upwards of 100 kinds of weapons are needed to make up a certain weapons

system before it can have an overall effect on war. However, the more
weapons that are invented, the smaller any individual weapon’s role in war
becomes, and this is a paradox that is inherent in the relationship between
weapons and war. . . . Other than the all-out use of nuclear weapons, a
situation which is more and more unlikely and which may be termed
nuclear war, none of the other weapons, even those that are extremely
revolutionary in nature, possesses the right to label future warfare. . . .

High technology, as spoken of in generalities, cannot become a
synonym for future warfare, nor is information technology . . . sufficient to
name a war. Even if in future wars all the weapons have information
components embedded in them and are fully computerized, we can still not
term such war “information warfare” . . . because, regardless of how
important information technology is, it cannot completely supplant the
functions and roles of each technology per se. For example, the F-22
fighter, which already fully embodies information technology, is still a
fighter, and the “Tomahawk” missile is still a missile, and one cannot lump
them all together as “information weapons,” nor can a war that’s
conducted using these weapons be termed information warfare.
Computerized warfare in the broad sense and information warfare in the
narrow sense are two completely different things. The former refers to the
various forms of warfare which are enhanced and accompanied by
information technology, while the latter primarily refers to war in which
information technology is used to obtain or suppress information. . . .

We are by no means denying that, in future warfare, certain advanced
weapons may play a leading role. However, as for determining the outcome
of war, it is now very difficult for anyone to occupy an unmatched position.
It may be leading, but it will not be alone, much less never-changing.

Many American military and civilian leaders—especially Donald
Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense during the post–9/11 wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan—focused on constantly improving our weapons systems in
terms of accuracy and lethality. Rumsfeld called this approach the
Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), and he considered its
implementation one of his major accomplishments at the Pentagon. He was

obsessed with using technology to speed up every military process, making
every response to every military threat more efficient.

But Qiao and Wang considered our huge investments in cutting-edge
weapons to be a misallocation of resources and a dangerous distraction
from what really matters in international conflicts. Historically, of course, it
mattered tremendously which country had the fastest ships, the most
accurate cannons, the bombers with the longest flying range. But the
authors saw the approach of a new era in which those metrics were less and
less important. For instance, it doesn’t matter how fast, deadly, and high-
tech your F-22s are if the greatest threat to America isn’t coming by air at
all.

It’s important to remember that UW was written more than two years
before 9/11, when Al Qaeda seriously damaged the United States with the
lowest of low-tech weapons: nineteen men armed with nothing but box
cutters and their resolve to die for jihad. All the billions of Pentagon
spending on cutting-edge systems couldn’t stop that unconventional threat.
After the initial and brilliantly unconventional defeat of the Taliban by U.S.
special ops and their local allies in the early 2000s, things quickly became
conventional and it took many years and many more billions of dollars to
merely block the vastly underpowered forces of the Taliban in Afghanistan
—efforts that became too costly in blood and treasure to sustain. In Iraq, the
application of swift and overwhelming conventional forces—an upgraded
version of the first Gulf War—failed to kill an insurgency that erupted into a
brutal guerrilla war that cost thousands of U.S. lives and hundreds of
billions of dollars in return for a tenuous peace. The estimated cost of both
those post–9/11 actions is estimated north of $2 trillion; some would argue
it may be double that.

From the CCP’s perspective, the shift predicted by UW and confirmed
on and after 9/11 was great news. China didn’t have a fighter jet even
remotely as advanced as the F-22, but that didn’t matter, because we’re not
in the age of the fighter jet anymore. And China could become far, far better
at unconventional warfare than an old-fashioned dictatorship like that of
Saddam Hussein.

“FIGHTING THE FIGHT THAT FITS ONE’S WEAPONS” AND “MAKING THE WEAPONS
TO FIT THE FIGHT”

. . . In the history of war, the general unwritten rule that people have
adhered to all along is to “fight the fight that fits one’s weapons.” Very
often it is the case that only after one first has a weapon does one begin to
formulate tactics to match it. With weapons coming first, followed by
tactics, the evolution of weapons has a decisive constraining effect on the
evolution of tactics. . . .

Today, those engaged in warfare . . . hardly realize that the United
States, the foremost power in the world, must similarly face this kind of
helplessness. Even though she is the richest in the world, it is not
necessarily possible for her to use up her uniform new and advanced
technology weapons to fight an expensive modern war. . . .

If one thinks that one must rely on advanced weapons to fight a modern
war, being blindly superstitious about the miraculous effects of such
weapons, it may actually result in turning something miraculous into
something rotten. . . .

[But] the position of weapons in invariably preceding a revolution in
military affairs has now been shaken, and now tactics come first, and
weapons follow, or the two encourage one another, with advancement in a
push-pull manner becoming the new relationship between them. . . .
Customizing weapons systems to tactics that are still being explored and
studied is like preparing food for a great banquet without knowing who is
coming, where the slightest error can lead one far astray. Viewed from the
performance of the U.S. military in Somalia, where they were at a loss when
they encountered Aidid’s forces [the ragged gunmen of warlord Mohammed
Aidid, who tried to force foreign troops out of Somalia in the early 1990s],
the most modern military force does not have the ability to control public
clamor, and cannot deal with an opponent who does things in an
unconventional manner. On the battlefields of the future, the digitized forces
may very possibly be like a great cook who is good at cooking lobsters
sprinkled with butter, when faced with guerrillas who resolutely gnaw
corncobs, they can only sigh in despair. . . . Looking at the specific

examples of battles that we have, it is difficult for high-tech troops to deal
with unconventional warfare and low-tech warfare. . . .

The authors were right in this diagnosis: For the first time in history,
unilateral access to superior weapons technology stopped conferring a big
advantage to the dominant power. America’s enormous nuclear arsenal
would be useless in small-scale deployments like Somalia in the 1990s, or
in the counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s.
Likewise with all of our cutting-edge conventional weapons, developed and
deployed at huge expense as part of Rumsfeld’s Revolution in Military
Affairs. “Helplessness” is a strong word, but not much of an exaggeration.
We thought we were strong by having the world’s most advanced weaponry,
but we found ourselves in situations where it was impossible to fight with
the full power of our weapons, or anywhere close to it. And we fell
catastrophically behind in making the weapons we actually did need for the
fights we got into, such as effective counterinsurgency strategies.

I remember rereading this section in dismay at the Pentagon in 2014. It
crystallized so many problems we had been having since the late 1990s and
how badly we had misplayed the evolution of international conflict. I
became determined to warn as many people as possible.

WEAPONS OF NEW CONCEPTS AND NEW CONCEPTS OF WEAPONS

. . . All these weapons and weapons platforms that have been produced in
line with traditional thinking have without exception come to a dead end in
their efforts to adapt to modern warfare and future warfare. Those desires
of using the magic of high-technology to work some alchemy on traditional
weapons so that they are completely remade have ultimately fallen into the
high-tech trap involving the endless waste of limited funds and an arms
race. This is the paradox that must inevitably be faced in the process of the
development of traditional weapons: To ensure that the weapons are in the
lead, one must continue to up the ante in development costs; the result of
this continued raising of the stakes is that no one has enough money to

maintain the lead. Its ultimate result is that the weapons to defend the
country actually become a cause of national bankruptcy.

Perhaps the most recent examples are the most convincing. Marshal
Orgakov [sic], the former chief of the Soviet general staff [Nikolai Ogarkov
was chief of staff from 1977 to 1984], was acutely aware of the trend of
weapons development in the “nuclear age,” and when, at an opportune
time, he proposed the brand-new concept of the “revolution in military
technology,” his thinking was clearly ahead of those of his generation. But
being ahead of time in his thinking hardly brought his country happiness,
and actually brought about disastrous results. As soon as this concept . . .
was proposed, it further intensified the arms race which had been going on
for some time between the United States and the Soviet Union. It was just
that, at that time no one could predict that it would actually result in the
breakup of the Soviet Union and its complete elimination from the
superpower contest. A powerful empire collapsed without a single shot
being fired, vividly corroborating the lines of the famous poem by Kipling,
“When empires perish, it is not with a rumble, but a snicker.” Not only was
this true for the former Soviet Union, today the Americans seem to be
following in the footsteps of their old adversary, providing fresh proof of the
paradox of weapons development that we have proposed. As the outlines of
the age of technology integration become increasingly clear, they are
investing more and more in the development of new weapons, and the cost
of the weapons is getting higher and higher. . . .

If this is still true for the rich and brash United States, then how far can
the other countries, who are short of money, continue down this path?
Obviously, it will be difficult for anyone to keep going. Naturally, the way to
extricate oneself from this predicament is to develop a different
approach. . . .

However, the Americans have not been able to get their act together in
this area. This is because proposing a new concept of weapons does not
require relying on the springboard of new technology, it just demands lucid
and incisive thinking. However, this is not a strong point of the Americans,
who are slaves to technology in their thinking. The Americans invariably

halt their thinking at the boundary where technology has not yet reached. It
cannot be denied that man-made earthquakes, tsunamis, weather disasters,
or subsonic wave and new biological and chemical weapons all constitute
new concept weapons, and that they have tremendous differences with what
we normally speak of as weapons, but they are still all weapons whose
immediate goal is to kill and destroy, and which are still related to military
affairs, soldiers, and munitions. Speaking in this sense, they are nothing
more than non-traditional weapons whose mechanisms have been altered
and whose lethal power and destructive capabilities have been magnified
several times over.

However, a new concept of weapons is different. . . . Everything that
can benefit mankind can also harm him. This is to say that there is nothing
in the world today that cannot become a weapon, and this requires that our
understanding of weapons must have an awareness that breaks through all
boundaries. With technological developments being in the process of
striving to increase the types of weapons, a breakthrough in our thinking
can open up the domain of the weapons kingdom at one stroke. As we see it,
a single man-made stock-market crash, a single computer virus invasion, or
a single rumor or scandal that results in a fluctuation in the enemy
country’s exchange rates or exposes the leaders of an enemy country on the
Internet, all can be included in the ranks of new-concept weapons. . . .

What must be made clear is that the new concept of weapons is in the
process of creating weapons that are closely linked to the lives of the
common people. . . . The new concept of weapons will cause ordinary
people and military men alike to be greatly astonished at the fact that
commonplace things that are close to them can also become weapons with
which to engage in war. We believe that some morning people will awake to
discover with surprise that quite a few gentle and kind things have begun to
have offensive and lethal characteristics.

In this section they’re almost gloating about the misallocation of
America’s defense budget, which was $298 billion in 1999 and ballooned to
north of $700 billion by 2020. We’re spending ourselves into an
unfathomable national debt while simultaneously failing to address the

greatest threat to our national security—the CCP’s stealth war in its
relentless drive to dominate the world.

The authors see a cautionary tale in the fall of the Soviet Union in the
late 1980s, in large part because of its overspending on cutting-edge
weapons systems, especially the nuclear arms race against the United
States. As they note, the Cold War ended without a shot being fired. It
would be the ultimate irony if the United States also lost its superpower
status by massively overspending on advanced weapons that were
ineffective against a nuclear-armed rival while ignoring our crumbling
infrastructure and other urgent national needs. Meanwhile, the CCP has
been focusing its resources not on an arms race but on building China’s
infrastructure and manufacturing capacity, and on reinforcing the Great
Firewall that blocks the outside world from interfering with the totalitarian
regime’s control of its own citizens.

They’re also mocking Americans as “slaves to technology” who can’t
bring themselves to even imagine, let alone execute, the kind of stealth war
strategy for international conflict that China has developed. The colonels
claim that if a weapon isn’t high-tech and expensive, Americans can’t even
recognize it as a weapon, despite the obvious truth that “everything that can
benefit mankind can also harm him.”

This is their key point: the urgency of weaponizing virtually any aspect
of daily life, from the global financial markets to the way our media (and
now, social media) can spread disinformation. There’s no need to resort to
biological or chemical warfare or setting off a man-made earthquake—
whatever that might have been, there were no details provided. Those kinds
of direct attacks on civilians would trigger a devastating conventional
military response from the United States. The CCP would get so much
further by being creative in new ways to cause havoc, literally under the
radar.

The reference to less wealthy nations is also a reminder that while the
United States is Enemy No. 1, China has multiple potential adversaries.
How far can the other countries, who are short of money, continue down
this path? reflects their awareness of wary Asian neighbors with whom they

have clashed in the past, such as Japan, India, Vietnam—and of course
Taiwan.

Interestingly, in the next section they make a rare acknowledgment of
international law and the notion of “crime against mankind”—precepts of
the civilized world that do not much trouble them elsewhere in the book.
They seem to say that once they’ve taken nuclear war or some kind of
massive bombardment off the table, all other means of destroying a society
are legitimate.

THE TREND TO “KINDER” WEAPONS

. . . Philosophical principles tell us that, whenever something reaches an
ultimate point, it will turn in the opposite direction. The invention of
nuclear weapons, this “ultra-lethal weapon” which can wipe out all
mankind, has plunged mankind into an existential trap of its own making.
Nuclear weapons have become a sword of Damocles hanging over the head
of mankind, which forces it to ponder: Do we really need “ultra-lethal”
weapons? What is the difference between killing an enemy once and killing
him 100 times? What is the point of defeating the enemy if it means risking
the destruction of the world? How do we avoid warfare that results in ruin
for all? . . .

The “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” passed by the United
Nations General Assembly in 1948, and more than 50 subsequent pacts
related to it, have established a set of international rules for human rights
in which it is recognized that the use of weapons of mass destruction—
particularly nuclear weapons—is a serious violation of the “right to life”
and represents a “crime against mankind.” . . .

The trend to “kinder” weapons is nothing other than a reflection in the
production and development of weapons of this great change in man’s
cultural background. At the same time, technological progress has given us
the means to strike at the enemy’s nerve center directly without harming
other things, giving us numerous new options for achieving victory, and all
these make people believe that the best way to achieve victory is to control,

not to kill. There have been changes in the concept of war and the concept
of weapons, and the approach of using uncontrolled slaughter to force the
enemy into unconditional surrender has now become the relic of a bygone
age. . . .

The appearance of precision-kill (accurate) weapons and non-lethal
(non-fatal) weapons is a turning point in the development of weapons,
showing for the first time that weapons are developing in a “kinder,” not a
“stronger” direction. Precision-kill weapons can hit a target precisely,
reducing collateral casualties, and like a gamma knife which can excise a
tumor with hardly any bleeding, it has led to “surgical” strikes and other
such new tactics, so that inconspicuous combat actions can achieve
extremely notable strategic results. . . .

Non-lethal weapons can effectively eliminate the combat capabilities of
personnel and equipment without loss of life. The trend that is embodied in
these weapons shows that mankind is in the process of overcoming its own
extreme thinking, beginning to learn to control the lethal power that it
already has but which is increasingly excessive. In the massive bombing
that lasted more than a month during the Gulf War, the loss of life among
civilians in Iraq only numbered in the thousands, far less than in the
massive bombing of Dresden during World War II.

Nuclear weapons aren’t going away, and indeed more countries than
ever either have them or are trying to develop them. But for a superpower
like the United States, their only real value now is as a deterrent. China
understood this early on and mostly stayed out of the nuclear arms race
during the Cold War. Until recently, the CCP chose to maintain a minimal
nuclear arsenal, just enough to deter any other nation’s potential nuclear
strike. By keeping its stockpile modest and its nuclear budget limited, the
Chinese avoided the massive expenses that helped bring down the Soviet
Union. As their wealth has grown, the Chinese have added to their nuclear
stockpile, creating alarm and some confusion among Western analysts. Are
new silos and warheads just a deepening of their deterrence force, or is this
a change of strategy in creating an offensive nuclear capability? Is it
perhaps a ruse, with empty silos or hollow missiles meant to provoke the

United States and others to waste yet more billions? From the colonels’
perspective in 1998, nuclear war is obsolete, but this may be an area where
the Chinese leadership has moved beyond that notion. And even if they are
simply increasing their deterrence, does that mean we have to increase our
lethality?

This is a key point that America’s military establishment still hasn’t
grappled with. We haven’t seen nuclear weapons used in warfare since
1945, which is great news for humanity, but a financial drag on a country
that continues to invest billions in ever more powerful and sophisticated
nukes. Beyond a minimum level of deterrence, developing extra lethality
that will effectively destroy the world is a waste of resources. The same is
true for what the authors call “ultra-lethal” conventional weapons.

Even one of today’s most respected military strategists, former Marine
general and former secretary of defense James Mattis, has a blind spot
regarding lethality—the sheer destructive potential of a military force.
During his time running the Department of Defense, Mattis focused on
making our armed forces more efficient at killing future enemies in a future
conventional war. The entire Pentagon fell in line with that way of thinking,
in part by reading books about efficient lethality like The Kill Chain, which
I mentioned in the previous chapter. Our top leaders have focused on
deploying the latest Silicon Valley technology to get better at what the
military already does without stopping to reconsider if our military should
pivot to very different priorities.

It’s not hard to see how these ideas get locked in. Imagine being the
world’s best typewriter repairman and so concentrated on the demands of
your craft that you miss the transition to PCs and word processing. By the
time you figure out that your hard-won mastery is nearly obsolete, you
might already be out of business. It has nothing to do with intelligence—
Mattis and other Pentagon leaders were extremely smart. The problem is
losing sight of the fundamental purpose of having a military.

Qiao and Wang were prescient about this trend toward precision strikes
that avoid escalating into war. Look at how the Trump administration took
out Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, without triggering a

much-feared military conflict. We’ve gotten better and better at
assassinating a single enemy leader from the air, which is the exact opposite
approach of carpet bombing that inflicts heavy civilian casualties. This can
be a very effective way to take out an enemy like Soleimani, who was
directly responsible for a significant number of American deaths. There was
no need to kill thousands of Iranian troops, let alone civilians, as collateral
damage.

They hint at other futuristic concepts that have come to reality:
Today, we already have enough technology, and we can create many
methods of causing fear which are more effective, such as using a laser
beam to project the image of injured followers against the sky, which would
be sufficient to frighten those soldiers who are devoutly religious. There are
no longer any obstacles to building this kind of weapon; it just requires that
some additional imagination be added to the technical element. . . .
Information weapons are a prominent example of kinder weapons.
Whether it involves electromagnetic energy weapons for hard destruction or
soft-strikes by computer logic bombs, network viruses, or media weapons,
all are focused on paralyzing and undermining, not personnel casualties.
Kinder weapons, which could only be born in an age of technical
integration, may very well be the most promising development trend for
weapons, and at the same time they will bring about forms of war or
revolutions in military affairs which we cannot imagine or predict
today. . . . Nonetheless, we still cannot indulge in romantic fantasies about
technology, believing that from this point on war will become a
confrontation like an electronic game, and even simulated warfare in a
computer room similarly must be premised upon a country’s actual overall
capabilities, and if a colossus with feet of clay comes up with ten plans for
simulated warfare, it will still not be sufficient to deter an enemy who is
more powerful with regard to actual strength.
War is still the ground of death and life, the path of survival and
destruction, and even the slightest innocence is not tolerated. Even if some
day all the weapons have been made completely humane, a kinder war in
which bloodshed may be avoided is still war. It may alter the cruel process

of war, but there is no way to change the essence of war, which is one of
compulsion, and therefore it cannot alter its cruel outcome, either.

The colonels are warning the CCP leadership not to get complacent
about the potential of high-tech “kinder” weapons in isolation. No matter
how precise targeting technology becomes, kinder weapons won’t be
sufficient to achieve the CCP’s goals or avoid drawing a conventional
military response from their enemies. This is another argument for pursuing
unconventional and unrestricted warfare. The authors see the invention of
those precise, less indiscriminate weapons as paving the way for even more
creative uses of modern technology to redefine war, far beyond the
traditional battlefield. A bloodless war—a stealth war—can do much more
to achieve the CCP’s goals than even the best military equipment on Earth.

I remember having a hard time wrapping my head around this chapter
when I first encountered it. As an Air Force officer, I was taught that there’s
a clear separation between politics and the military. Politicians negotiate
peace, and generals manage war. Either Congress issues a declaration of
war or a president orders an official use of military force. We were taught
that those boundaries were crucial and fundamental.

But now we’re facing an enemy that not only ignores those boundaries
but doesn’t even frame the question that way. The authors are right that war
has been increasingly decoupled from bloodshed, to a far more complete
degree than the less bloody options of “kinder weapons.” A country being
attacked in an unrestricted war might not even realize that it has been
attacked—whereas the Iranians absolutely knew they were being attacked
in January 2020, even with just a single casualty.

But while the colonels keenly foresee the tools of “kinder war,” they
don’t extrapolate the potential consequences. A disruption of a nation’s
electric grid or gasoline pipeline may be “bloodless” at the outset, but the
resultant chaos is anything but benign.

Still, the phrase that rings out and tells us so much about China’s
strategy—as seen in the “magic weapon” work of the millions of
individuals hired as subcontractors and referred to as United Front soldiers
—was this: The best way to achieve victory is to control, not to kill.

CHAPTER 5

THE WAR GOD’S FACE HAS BECOME
INDISTINCT

WHEN I WORKED IN THE WHITE HOUSE FOR THE NATIONAL S
asked the acting director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy what
he was doing about the tens of thousands of Americans who were dying
from overdoses of fentanyl, which is often smuggled in from China. He
said, “We’re cooperating with the Chinese government to bring the makers
of the drugs to justice.” I told him the CCP was not really cooperating with
him, no matter what they told him. In fact, they were either directly or
indirectly behind the drug smuggling. His response was total disbelief,
claiming that Chinese law enforcement had recently arrested some
producers of fentanyl. I said those producers would soon be out of prison
and back in business. As long as they were selling only to the United States,
the CCP didn’t care about illegal drug sales or American overdoses. I also
told him that Chinese pharmaceutical factories that made drugs legally for
major American brands were certainly involved. He still didn’t buy it.

I thought of that conversation as I studied this chapter of UW. It brings
together the immorality of the CCP and the naivete of the America
government. War with no rules means just that. Nothing is out of bounds. A
plague of drug deaths makes a good propaganda point about a decaying
society.

This comprehensive chapter swiftly takes us through a history of war, a
history of China, the evolution of the colonels’ theory of unrestricted war,
how that war blurs the lines between military and civilians, and a very
specific list of the kind of war they envision. They write lyrically about the
past and with an unemotional directness about the future. Here we find one
of the book’s most concise and disturbing quotes:

Just think, if it’s even possible to start a war in a computer room or a
stock exchange that will send an enemy country to its doom, then is there
non-battlespace anywhere?

If that young lad setting out with his orders should ask today: “Where
is the battlefield?” The answer would be: “Everywhere.”

The United States simply doesn’t see it that way. We are siloed into
military—which is mostly set up to fight battles—and a giant bureaucracy,
which deals with China on a piecemeal basis, assuming they are dealing
with equally earnest bureaucrats trying to solve a problem. The Chinese
counterpart has different assumptions because he too is a soldier. Which is
why we should not trust any part of their government.

When I would brief our senior military leaders about the stealth war
they had two responses: “Holy shit!” and “That’s not my job.”

The roots of Chinese history—both the military tactics and the
country’s sense of lost greatness, humiliation by the West, and the yearning
for restoration—are important underlying themes that help give the book its
power. The colonels are, to a great extent, preaching to the choir. Their
vision is not a radical departure from centuries of Chinese beliefs but rather
a modernized and practical version, distilled over three decades of
Communist propaganda.

For those who are reassured that China is not a historically warlike
nation—based on a lack of imperial conquests—history shows that there
remain deep veins of warrior culture and military tradition. The Chinese
have fought many wars within their own vast borders. But although there
was plenty of bloodshed, the notion of a war without violence recurs in
much Chinese thought, most notably in The Art of War. Mao’s Little Red
Book states: “Fighting is unpleasant, and the people of China would prefer

not to do it at all. At the same time, they stand ready to wage a just struggle
of self-preservation against reactionary elements, both domestic and
foreign.” When they did it against the United States in the Korean War, the
results were disastrous, with an estimated 900,000 troops killed or
wounded. Precisely because their record of military success is less than
stellar, they tend to be risk averse when it comes to direct conflict.

The modern part is, once again, Qiao and Wang’s strong grasp of the
power of emerging technologies. You can see this as similar to the invention
of gunpowder, but as if there were simultaneously a hundred different kinds
of gunpowder.

There are also many new actors beyond just a handful of nations that
can make use of that new gunpowder. They foresee a proliferation of terror
groups. One they are particularly interested in: Al Qaeda and Osama bin
Laden.

They see this as all part of the new world, making clear that their
overall philosophy is one of realpolitik, eschewing any need for loyalty or
morality.

From Chapter 2 of Unrestricted Warfare

. . . For several thousand years, the three indispensable “hardware”
elements of any war have been soldiers, weapons and a battlefield. Running
through them all has been the “software” element of warfare: its
purposefulness. Before now, nobody has questioned that these are the basic
elements of warfare. The problem comes when people discover that all of
these basic elements, which seemingly were hard and fast, have changed so
that it is impossible to get a firm grip on them. When that day comes, is the
war god’s face still distinct?

This chapter is getting deeper into the main idea of unrestricted
warfare: that the definitions of warriors, weapons, and battlefields have all
fundamentally changed, expanding beyond recognition. As the authors note
in the next section, this is the first time since Clausewitz that the very
purpose of war has been force-fed directly into the bloodstream of a
functioning nation-state. Now every civilian is a potential warrior or target,
every aspect of modern life is a potential weapon, and every sphere of
human activity is a potential battlefield.

Mentioning “the war god’s face” is a reference to the literal god of war
that all ancient polytheistic cultures prayed to for success. By saying this
god’s face is indistinct or blurry, the authors are saying that war itself has
become disconnected from the weapons and battlefields whence it
previously acquired its name. In other words, chivalry and the laws of
armed conflict are for suckers. This kind of flowery metaphor is partly why
Western strategists and policy makers failed to take UW seriously when
they first encountered it.

WHY FIGHT AND FOR WHOM?

. . . As far as their aims, the wars prosecuted by our ancestors were
relatively simple in terms of the goals to be achieved. . . . This was because
our ancestors had limited horizons, their spheres of activity were narrow,

they had modest requirements for existence, and their weapons were not
lethal enough. . . . Just so, Clausewitz wrote his famous saying, which has
been an article of faith for several generations of soldiers and statesmen:
“War is a continuation of politics.” Our ancestors would fight perhaps for
the orthodox status of a religious sect, or perhaps for an expanse of
pastureland with plenty of water and lush grass. They would not even have
scruples about going to war over, say, spices, liquor or a love affair
between a king and queen. . . . Then there is the war that the English
launched against the Qing monarchy for the sake of the opium trade.
[Between 1839 and 1860, England and later France enforced their desire to
sell opium to the Chinese, inflicting a series of military defeats and leaving
an enduring sense of humiliation, which included the lease handover of
Hong Kong to the British.] This was national drug trafficking activity on
probably the grandest scale in recorded history. . . .

Prior to recent times, there was just one kind of warfare in terms of the
kind of motive and the kind of subsequent actions taken. . . .

To assess why people fight is not so easy today, however. In former
times, the idea of “exporting revolution” and the slogan of “checking the
expansion of communism” were calls to action that elicited countless
responses. But especially after the conclusion of the Cold War, when the
Iron Curtain running all along the divide between the two great camps
[Western Europe and the Soviet Union] suddenly collapsed, these calls have
lost their effectiveness. The times of clearly drawn sides are over.

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? These used to be the
paramount questions in regard to revolution and counterrevolution.
Suddenly the answers have become complicated, confusing and hard to get
hold of [because the adversary might be a business partner]. A country that
yesterday was an adversary is in the process of becoming a current partner
today, while a country that once was an ally will perhaps be met on the
battlefield at the next outbreak of war. . . . All of this serves to again confirm
that old saying: “all friendship is in flux; self-interest is the only
constant.” . . .

The reason for starting a war can be anything from a dispute over
territory and resources, a dispute over religious beliefs, hatred stemming
from tribal differences or ideology, a dispute over market share, a dispute
over the distribution of power and authority, a dispute over trade sanctions,
or a dispute stemming from financial unrest. The goals of warfare have
become blurred due to the pursuit of a variety of agendas. Thus, it is more
and more difficult for people to say clearly just why they are fighting.

Every young lad that participated in the Gulf War will tell you right up
front that he fought to restore justice in tiny, weak Kuwait. . . . In reality,
every country that participated in the Gulf War decided to join “Desert
Storm” only after carefully thinking over its own intentions and goals.
Throughout the whole course of the war, all of the Western powers were
fighting for their oil lifeline. To this primary goal, the Americans added the
aspiration of building a new world order with “USA” stamped on it. . . .
From start to finish, the British reacted enthusiastically to President Bush’s
[President George H. W. Bush] every move. . . . The French, in order to
prevent the complete evaporation of their traditional influence in the
Middle East, finally sent troops to the Gulf at the last moment. Naturally,
there is no way that a war prosecuted under these kinds of conditions can
be a contest fought over a single objective. The aggregate of the self-
interests of all the numerous countries participating in the war serves to
transform a modern war like “Desert Storm” into a race to further various
self-interests under the banner of a common interest. Thus, so-called
“common interest” has become merely the war equation’s largest common
denominator that can be accepted by every allied party participating in the
war effort. Since different countries will certainly be pursuing different
agendas in a war, it is necessary to take the self-interest of every allied
party into consideration if the war is to be prosecuted jointly. . . . The
complex interrelationships among self-interests make it impossible to
pigeonhole the Gulf War as having been fought for oil, or as having been
fought for the new world order, or as having been fought to drive out the
invaders. Only a handful of soldiers are likely to grasp a principle that
every statesman already knows: that the biggest difference between

contemporary wars and the wars of the past is that, in contemporary wars,
the overt goal and the covert goal are often two different matters.

In this section the colonels make the accurate point that the purpose of
war has expanded dramatically and confusingly beyond traditional conflicts
over religion, honor, or land. Note the bitter reference to the Opium Wars of
the mid-nineteenth century as an example of old-fashioned war for profit.
Because the British humiliated the Chinese, the CCP has consistently used
the memory of the Opium Wars to stoke nationalism and hatred of the West.
In fact, the Opium Wars are depicted by China’s education system and
media as the start of the “century of humiliation” from 1849 to 1949 that
the CCP is still avenging.

But despite this nod to ancient enmity, the colonels’ main point is that
allies and enemies are now in constant flux as financial and economic
relationships shift. No nation is truly a “friend” to another anymore, if that
word was ever valid. Nations don’t have friends, only interests. They are
warning the CCP not to fall for the language of traditional alliances.

As usual, their favorite example is the Gulf War. They depict the
liberation of Kuwait as essentially a fake, PR-driven excuse for the Bush 41
administration to go to war. Defending a helpless, tiny country like Kuwait
against the evil forces of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq made a great story for the
media and inspired the rank-and-file troops, but the colonels claim to see
through it. They saw the Gulf War as driven by America’s desire to
dominate the new world order after the fall of the Soviet Union and to
secure a steady supply of Middle Eastern oil. Likewise, they saw Britain
and France also driven by oil, as well as by their need to stay in America’s
good graces. They saw the Western alliance flexing its muscles on the
world stage by imposing its will on Iraq while blatantly lying about its
motives.

This is obviously an oversimplified and cynical analysis. And we
cannot discount the two colonels’ biases from their Communist
indoctrination. Of course, the United States cared about protecting the
West’s oil supply, but President Bush’s outrage about the invasion of
Kuwait also seemed sincere. Countries can and do have multiple goals for a

single action, and those goals can blend selfish interests with compassionate
altruism. But I would agree that the Chinese don’t see it that way.

WHERE TO FIGHT?

. . . During the long period of time before firearms, battlefields were small
and compact. A face-off at close quarters between two armies might unfold
on a small expanse of level ground, in a mountain pass, or within the
confines of a city. In the eyes of today’s soldier, the battlefield that so
enraptured the ancients is . . . fundamentally incapable of accommodating
the spectacle of war as it has unfolded in recent times on such a grand
scale. . . .

A soldier’s fate is determined by the era in which he lives. [During
World War I], the wingspan of the war god could not extend any farther
than the range of a Krupp artillery piece. . . . 20 years later, [Hitler] had
long range weapons at his disposal. He utilized bombers powered by
Mercedes engines and V-1 and V-2 guided missiles and broke the British
Isles’ record of never having been encroached upon by an invader. Hitler,
who was neither a strategist nor a tactician, . . . never really understood the
revolutionary significance of breaking through the partition separating
battlefield elements from non-battlefield elements. . . .

This time, technology is again running ahead of the military
thinking . . . [extending] the contemporary battlefield to a degree that is
virtually infinite: there are satellites in space, there are submarines under
the water, there are ballistic missiles that can reach anyplace on the globe,
and electronic countermeasures are now being carried out in the invisible
electromagnetic spectrum space. Even the last refuge of the human race—
the inner world of the heart—cannot avoid the attacks of psychological
warfare. There are nets above and snares below, so that a person has no
place to flee. . . .

Some extremely imaginative and creative soldiers are just now
attempting to introduce these battlespaces into the warfare of the future.
The time for a fundamental change in the battlefield—the arena of war—is

not far off. Before very long, a network war or a nanometer war might
become a reality right in our midst, a type of war that nobody even
imagined in the past. It is likely to be very intense, but with practically no
bloodshed. Nevertheless, it is likely to determine who is the victor and who
the vanquished in an overall war. . . .

The two types of battlespaces—the conventional space and the
technological space—will overlap and intersect with each other and will be
mutually complementary as each develops in its own way . . . which will all
ultimately serve to make up a marvelous battlefield unprecedented in the
annals of human warfare. At the same time, with the progressive breaking
down of the distinction between military technology and civilian
technology, and between the professional soldier and the non-professional
warrior, the battlespace will overlap more and more with the non-
battlespace, serving also to make the line between these two entities less
and less clear. Fields that were formerly isolated from each other are being
connected. Mankind is endowing virtually every space with battlefield
significance. . . . Just think, if it’s even possible to start a war in a computer
room or a stock exchange that will send an enemy country to its doom, then
is there non-battlespace anywhere?

If that young lad setting out with his orders should ask today: “Where
is the battlefield?” The answer would be: “Everywhere.”

The new battlespaces that they’re describing in this section require
close cooperation among a country’s military, government, and private
sectors. The problem for the United States is that we’re still used to seeing
those three spheres as quite separate, even as they’ve become more and
more overlapping since the publication of UW. Our military strategists,
politicians, and business leaders have mostly been locked into the world
they grew up with, in which governments set objectives, military forces
carried out those objectives, and the private sector’s main role was
producing material for the military. As the authors put it, technology is
changing faster than the ability of strategists to make sense of those
changes.

Today’s battlefield has no limits, except those we ourselves impose by
our own limited perspectives. While physics ultimately restricts what’s
possible on land, sea, and air, such as the range of a bomber, there are no
equivalent limits in cyberspace, other than the creativity of hackers. And in
other realms of unrestricted warfare, the limiting factor is how far
politicians and business leaders are willing to go.

The last time the United States had true solidarity between the political,
military, and private sectors was probably World War II, when everyone
who bought war bonds or participated in a scrap metal drive felt like part of
the war effort, and when Rosie the Riveters felt like they weren’t simply
working for a paycheck but were defeating fascism. Today, by contrast, our
civilian and business cultures have never been more disconnected and
remote from our military culture. Is it even still possible to get them all
working toward the same goals, as China does via the top-down control of
the CCP?

WHO FIGHTS?

. . . The era of “strong and brave soldiers who are heroic defenders of the
nation” has already passed. In a world where even “nuclear warfare” will
perhaps become obsolete military jargon, it is likely that a pasty-faced
scholar wearing thick eyeglasses is better suited to be a modern soldier
than is a strong young lowbrow with bulging biceps. . . .

Modern weapons systems have made it possible for [soldiers] to be far
removed from any conventional battlefield, and they can attack the enemy
from a place beyond his range of vision where they need not come face to
face with the dripping blood that comes with killing. All of this has turned
each and every soldier into a self-effacing gentleman who would just as
soon avoid the sight of blood. The digital fighter is taking over the role
formerly played by the “blood and iron” warrior—a role that, for
thousands of years, has not been challenged. . . .

Mao Zedong’s theory concerning “every citizen a soldier” has certainly
not been in any way responsible for this tendency. The current trend does

not demand extensive mobilization of the people. Quite the contrary, it
merely indicates that a technological elite among the citizenry have broken
down the door and barged in uninvited, making it impossible for
professional soldiers with their concepts of professionalized warfare to
ignore challenges that are somewhat embarrassing. [This idea of an
impertinent technological elite came full circle in 2021, when the CCP
leadership cracked down on tech companies and their billionaire
entrepreneurs such as Alibaba’s Jack Ma. Their wealth and independence
had become a threat to the party.]

In 1994, a computer hacker in England attacked the U.S. military’s
Rome Air Development Center in New York State, compromising the
security of 30 systems. He also hacked into more than 100 other
systems. . . . What astounded people was not only the scale of those affected
by the attack and the magnitude of the damage, but also the fact that the
hacker was merely 16 years old. Naturally, an intrusion by a teenager
playing a game cannot be regarded as an act of war. The problem is, how
does one know for certain which damage is the result of games and which
damage is the result of warfare? Which acts are individual acts by citizens
and which acts represent hostile actions by non-professional warriors, or
perhaps even organized hacker warfare launched by a state? . . .

Whether they are doing good or doing ill, [hackers] do not feel bound
by the rules of the game that prevail in the society at large. . . . They may
delete someone else’s precious data, that was obtained with such difficulty,
as a practical joke. Or, like the legendary lone knight-errant, they may use
their outstanding technical skills to take on the evil powers that be. The
Suharto government imposed a strict blockade on news about the organized
aggressive actions against the ethnic Chinese living in Indonesia. The
aggressive actions were first made public on the Internet by witnesses with
a sense of justice. As a result, the whole world was utterly shocked, and the
Indonesian government and military were pushed before the bar of morality
and justice. Prior to this, another group of hackers calling themselves
“Milworm” put on another fine performance on the Internet. In order to
protest India’s nuclear tests, they penetrated the firewall of the network

belonging to India’s [Bhabha] Atomic Research Center (BARC), altered the
home page, and downloaded 5 MB of data. . . .

The various and sundry monstrous and virtually insane destructive acts
by these kinds of groups are undoubtedly more likely to be the new breeding
ground for contemporary wars than is the behavior of the lone ranger
hacker. Moreover, when a nation state or national armed force (which
adheres to certain rules and will only use limited force to obtain a limited
goal) faces off with one of these types of organizations (which never
observe any rules and which are not afraid to fight an unlimited war using
unlimited means), it will often prove very difficult for the nation state or
national armed force to gain the upper hand.

More murderous than hackers—and more of a threat in the real world—
are the non-state organizations, whose very mention causes the Western
world to shake in its boots. These organizations, which all have a certain
military flavor to a greater or lesser degree, are generally driven by some
extreme creed or cause, such as: the Islamic organizations pursuing a holy
war; the Caucasian militias in the U.S.; the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult;
and, most recently, terrorist groups like Osama bin Ladin’s, which blew up
the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. . . .

During the 1990’s [sic], and concurrent with the series of military
actions launched by non-professional warriors and non-state organizations,
we began to get an inkling of a non-military type of war which is prosecuted
by yet another type of non-professional warrior. This person is not a hacker
in the general sense of the term, and also is not a member of a quasi-
military organization. Perhaps he or she is a systems analyst or a software
engineer, or a financier with a large amount of mobile capital, or a stock
speculator. He or she might even perhaps be a media mogul who controls a
wide variety of media, a famous columnist or the host of a TV program. His
or her philosophy of life is different from that of certain blind and inhuman
terrorists. Frequently, he or she has a firmly held philosophy of life and his
or her faith is by no means inferior to Osama bin Ladin’s in terms of its
fanaticism. Moreover, he or she does not lack the motivation or courage to

enter a fight as necessary. Judging by this kind of standard, who can say
that George Soros is not a financial terrorist?

From now on, soldiers no longer have a monopoly on war. Global
terrorist activity is one of the by-products of the globalization trend that has
been ushered in by technological integration. Non-professional warriors
and non-state organizations are posing a greater and greater threat to
sovereign nations, making these warriors and organizations more and more
serious adversaries for every professional army. Compared to these
adversaries, professional armies are like gigantic dinosaurs which lack
strength commensurate to their size in this new age. Their adversaries,
then, are rodents with great powers of survival, which can use their sharp
teeth to torment the better part of the world.

The colonels are drawing an evolutionary time line from traditional
warriors to “digital fighters” employed by a military force, to “citizen
soldiers” who have no formal ties to the military but can wreak tremendous
havoc. They saw the writing on the wall as early as 1994, when that teenage
English hacker hinted at far more destructive cyberattacks that would
follow, with or without government sponsors. The authors weren’t wrong to
suggest that autonomous individuals with the right tech skills could
approach the power of a nation-state in undermining a dictator like
Indonesia’s Suharto.

I find it especially interesting that the colonels had Osama bin Laden on
their radar as a practitioner of unconventional warfare, more than two years
before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September
11, 2001. This made them more prescient than America’s intelligence and
military establishment, which almost completely missed the potential
destructiveness of “non-state organizations” like those nineteen jihadist
hijackers armed with nothing more than box cutters.

While we’ve become much more alert over the past two decades to the
threat of terrorism, our military establishment still feels most comfortable
planning and training for conventional fighting on conventional battlefields.
We’re still not prepared for cyberwar attacks like the 2020 breach of
multiple agencies and departments of the federal government, presumed to

be carried out by Russian hackers. The Pentagon is still focused on getting
better and better at fighting conventional wars while our enemies are getting
better and better at unconventional attacks that are far more sophisticated
than those of 9/11.

And please note that the colonels aren’t merely talking about terrorist
groups. They are also focused on the financial clout of individuals or
companies that can move large amounts of globalized capital in and out of
countries for their own gain, which has the potential to wreck economies.
They refer to George Soros not as the key figure in current extremist
conspiracy theories, but as the currency manipulator whose independent,
private sector actions in 1997 triggered a wave of serious financial crises in
Southeast Asia. That financial crisis had a profound effect on the CCP
leadership and helped spur them to protect their financial system from the
West. The authors suggest that the devastation of an intentionally triggered
currency crisis can be just as bad as a terrorist attack, even if less literally
bloody. And today’s financial giants control far more capital that can be
weaponized than George Soros did a quarter century ago.

WHAT MEANS AND METHODS ARE USED TO FIGHT?

There’s no getting around the opinions of the Americans when it comes to
discussing what means and methods will be used to fight future wars. This
is not simply because the U.S. is the latest lord of the mountain in the world.
It is more because the opinions of the Americans really are superior
compared to the prevailing opinions among the military people of other
nations. The Americans have summed up the four main forms that
warfighting will take in the future as: 1) Information warfare; 2) Precision
warfare; 3) Joint operations; and 4) Military operations other than war
(MOOTW). This last sentence is a mouthful. From this sentence alone we
can see the highly imaginative, and yet highly practical approach of the
Americans, and we can also gain a sound understanding of the warfare of
the future as seen through the eyes of the Americans. . . .

General Gordon R. Sullivan, the former Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army
[1991–95], maintained that information warfare will be the basic form of
warfighting in future warfare. For this reason, he set up the best digitized
force in the U.S. military, and in the world. Moreover, he proposed the
concept of precision warfare, based on the perception that “there will be an
overall swing towards information processing and stealthy long-range
attacks as the main foundations of future warfare.” . . .

Precision warfare, which has been dubbed “non-contact attack” by the
Americans, and “remote combat” by the Russians, is characterized by
concealment, speed, accuracy, a high degree of effectiveness, and few
collateral casualties. In wars of the future, where the outcome will perhaps
be decided not long after the war starts, this type of tactic, which has
already showed some of its effectiveness in the Gulf War, will probably be
the method of choice that will be embraced most gladly by U.S. generals.
However, the phrase that really demonstrates some creative wording is not
“information warfare” or “precision warfare,” but rather the phrase
“military operations other than war.”

[MOOTW] is clearly based on the “world’s interest,” which the
Americans are constantly invoking, and the concept implies a rash
overstepping of its authority by the U.S.—a classic case of the American
attitude that “I am responsible for every place under the sun.”
Nevertheless, such an assessment does not by any means stifle our praise of
this concept, because for the first time it permits a variety of measures that
are needed. . . . Such needed measures include peacekeeping, efforts to
suppress illicit drugs, riot suppression, military aid, arms control, disaster
relief . . . and striking at terrorist activities. Contact with this broader
concept of war cannot but lessen the soldiers’ attachment to the MOOTW
box itself. Ultimately, they will not be able to put the brand-new concept of
“non-military war operations” into the box. When this occurs, it will
represent an understanding that has genuine revolutionary significance in
terms of mankind’s perception of war.

The difference between the concepts of “non-military war operations”
and “military operations other than war” is far greater than a surface

reading would indicate and is by no means simply a matter of changing the
order of some words in a kind of word game. The latter concept, MOOTW,
may be considered simply an explicit label for missions and operations by
armed forces that are carried out when there is no state of war. The former
concept, “non-military war operations,” extends our understanding of
exactly what constitutes a state of war to each and every field of human
endeavor, far beyond what can be embraced by the term “military
operations.” This type of extension is the natural result of the fact that
human beings will use every conceivable means to achieve their goals.
While it seems that the Americans are in the lead in every field of military
theory, they were not able to take the lead in proposing this new concept of
war. However, we cannot fail to recognize that the flood of U.S.-style
pragmatism around the world, and the unlimited possibilities offered by
new, high technology, were nevertheless powerful forces behind the
emergence of this concept.

While there has been much praise over the years for the precision
capabilities of the American military, Qiao and Wang make clear that they
are talking about something completely different. Interestingly, they find
this less lethal form of war to be admirable—in a rare compliment to the
United States. But they still see it residing in a traditional sphere of military
control and doctrine. We’re playing checkers and they’re playing 3D chess.

Of the four types of future warfare addressed in this section, three
evolved from existing military traditions. The Western military strategists
we discussed in previous chapters, like Boyd and Warden, would appreciate
today’s level of precision warfare and the Pentagon’s focus on speed and
lethality on the battlefield. They would recognize the increasing focus on
joint operations—the effort to get the different service branches working
together more cohesively—which played such a huge role during our post–
9/11 invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. They’d also
understand today’s information warfare as the evolution of traditional
propaganda, now done via social media and email blasts rather than leaflet
drops from the air or unauthorized radio broadcasts into an enemy’s
frequencies.

But they might have a harder time wrapping their minds around
military operations other than war, which can be defined as using a military
force to deter war, resolve conflicts, promote peace, and support civil
authorities in response to domestic crises. This concept goes against the
traditional definition of military force, but it has played an increasingly
large role in Pentagon thinking over the past two decades. In Iraq and
Afghanistan, MOOTW included the controversial adoption of
counterinsurgency (COIN) as a top priority by occupation forces to win
over civilian populations that were being recruited by jihadist terrorist
groups.

The effectiveness of COIN and other MOOTW initiatives during those
occupations are still being debated, but what matters for this discussion is
how hard it was for most of our senior military leadership to adapt to this
new paradigm. Many resisted the idea that highly trained warriors would
need to focus on winning civilian hearts and minds more than on blowing
up military targets and killing our enemies before they could kill us. And
yet this conception of MOOTW was much less radical than the brand of
unrestricted warfare that the CCP was practicing by the early 2000s.
Because of UW, China got a huge head start on information warfare, as well
as the many other forms of nonmilitary operations introduced in the rest of
this chapter. And the CCP saw America’s arrogance preventing us from
understanding what China was doing while we were distracted by long and
frustrating engagements in the Middle East.

NONMILITARY WAR OPERATIONS: TRADE WAR AND FINANCIAL WAR

So, which [of many kinds of unconventional] means, which seem totally
unrelated to war, will ultimately become the favored minions of this new
type of war—“the non-military war operation”—being waged with greater
and greater frequency all around the world?

Trade War: About a dozen years ago, “trade war” was still simply a
descriptive phrase, but today it has become a tool in the hands of many
countries for waging non-military warfare. It can be used with particularly

great skill in the hands of the Americans, who have perfected it to a fine art.
Some of the means used include: the use of domestic trade law on the
international stage; the arbitrary erection and dismantling of tariff
barriers; the use of hastily written trade sanctions; the imposition of
embargoes on exports of critical technologies; the use of the Special
Section 301 law; and the application of most-favored-nation (MFN)
treatment, etc., etc. Any one of these means can have a destructive effect
that is equal to that of a military operation. The comprehensive eight-year
embargo against Iraq that was initiated by the U.S. is the most classic
textbook example in this regard.

Financial War: Now that Asians have experienced the financial crisis in
Southeast Asia, no one could be more affected by “financial war” than they
have been. . . . A surprise financial war attack that was deliberately
planned and initiated by the owners of international mobile capital
ultimately served to pin one nation after another to the ground—nations
that not long ago were hailed as “little tigers” and “little dragons.” [Those
phrases refer to South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.]
Economic prosperity that once excited the constant admiration of the
Western world changed to a depression, like the leaves of a tree that are
blown away in a single night by the autumn wind. After just one round of
fighting, the economies of a number of countries had fallen back ten years.
What is more, such a defeat on the economic front precipitates a near
collapse of the social and political order. The casualties resulting from the
constant chaos are no less than those resulting from a regional war, and the
injury done to the living social organism even exceeds the injury inflicted by
a regional war. . . .

Thus, financial war is a form of non-military warfare which is just as
terribly destructive as a bloody war, but in which no blood is actually
shed. . . . We believe that before long, “financial warfare” will undoubtedly
be an entry in the various types of dictionaries of official military jargon.
Moreover, when people revise the history books on [late-] twentieth-century
warfare, the section on financial warfare will command the reader’s utmost
attention. The main protagonist will not be a statesman or a military

strategist; rather, it will be George Soros. . . . After Soros began his
activities, Li Denghui [Taiwan’s president from 1988 to 2000] used the
financial crisis in Southeast Asia to devalue the New Taiwan dollar, so as to
launch an attack on the Hong Kong dollar and Hong Kong stocks. . . .

In addition, . . . large and small speculators have come en masse to this
huge dinner party for money gluttons, including Morgan Stanley and
Moody’s, which are famous for the credit rating reports that they issue, and
which point out promising targets of attack for the benefit of the big fish in
the financial world. These two companies are typical of those entities that
participate indirectly in the great feast and reap the benefits.

In the summer of 1998, after the fighting in the financial war had been
going on for a full year, the war’s second round of battles began to unfold
on an even more extensive battlefield, and this round of battles continues to
this day. This time, it was not just the countries of Southeast Asia (which
had suffered such a crushing defeat during the previous year) that were
drawn into the war. Two titans were also drawn in—Japan and Russia. This
resulted in making the global economic situation even more grim and
difficult to control. . . .

Today, when nuclear weapons have already become frightening
mantlepiece decorations that are losing their real operational value with
each passing day, financial war has become a “hyperstrategic” weapon
that is attracting the attention of the world. This is because financial war is
easily manipulated, allows for concealed actions, and is also highly
destructive. . . . Perhaps we could dub this type of war “foundation-style”
financial war. The greater and greater frequency and intensity of this type of
war, and the fact that more and more countries and non-state organizations
are deliberately using it, are causes for concern and are facts that we must
face squarely.

Trade war and financial war aren’t metaphors to the authors of UW—
they are seen as very real forms of war. The colonels see the U.S.
Congress’s annual vote against China’s Most Favored Nation trade status as
an act of war against the Chinese, as are the International Monetary Fund’s
tight monetary policies and China’s exclusion from the World Trade

Organization, which lasted until December 2001. These kinds of grievances
stoke the CCP’s ongoing resentment of and belligerence toward the West. In
particular, the Asian financial crisis of 1997 made a huge impression on
them. Capital flight from Asia and the new requirements of the IMF showed
the CCP how much unilateral power the United States had in the global
financial system. Secure access to capital became an extremely critical
issue.

Section 301 refers to part of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974, which
authorizes the president to take all appropriate action, including tariff-based
retaliation, to respond to any foreign government that violates an
international trade agreement or acts in an unjustified or unreasonable way
on trade, especially regarding alleged violations of intellectual property. It’s
another aspect of our economic relationship that made the CCP feel like the
United States was the aggressor against China, not the reverse.

For America’s political and military establishment, however, financial
and trade policies have nothing to do with warfare. I doubt anyone in the
Pentagon was even paying attention to the headlines about capital flight and
currency manipulation in 1997. The Clinton administration saw the Asian
financial crisis as a multilateral issue that had to be handled mainly by
global organizations like the IMF. And they certainly took no responsibility
for private sector financial players like George Soros or Morgan Stanley.
They saw the financial crisis as an unfortunate consequence of globalized
financial markets, not an act of aggression by the United States against the
Asian countries. Likewise, I had never even heard of Section 301 during my
career as an Air Force officer until I got to the White House in 2017.

In response to the Asian financial crisis, the CCP did more to insulate
their economy from outside attacks. Today they have a nonconvertible
currency and strict capital controls. They are even moving forward with a
digital currency that won’t be subject to the global financial markets—a
Chinese version of bitcoin.

The authors are right that financial war can be especially devastating
because it can be planned and executed stealthily, often concealed via
proxies in the private sector. The CCP uses its insulated banking system,

Chinese companies, and other nongovernmental organizations as its proxies
in ongoing financial warfare. They didn’t invent these tactics, but they’ve
adapted them from malicious individuals and terrorist groups, as we’ll see
in the chapters ahead.

NONMILITARY WAR OPERATIONS: TERROR WAR AND ECOLOGICAL WAR

New Terror War in Contrast to Traditional Terror War: Due to the limited
scale of a traditional terror war, its casualties might well be fewer than the
casualties resulting from a conventional war or campaign. Nevertheless, a
traditional terror war carries a stronger flavor of violence . . . [because] it
is never bound by any of the traditional rules of the society at large. From a
military standpoint, then, the traditional terror war is characterized by the
use of limited resources to fight an unlimited war. This characteristic
invariably puts national forces in an extremely unfavorable position even
before war breaks out, since national forces must always conduct
themselves according to certain rules and therefore are only able to use
their unlimited resources to fight a limited war. This explains how a
terrorist organization made up of just a few inexperienced members who
are still wet behind the ears can nevertheless give a mighty country like the
U.S. headaches, and also why “using a sledgehammer to kill an ant” often
proves ineffective. The most recent proof is the case of the two explosions
that occurred simultaneously at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es
Salaam. The advent of bin Ladin–style terrorism has deepened the
impression that a national force, no matter how powerful, will find it
difficult to gain the upper hand in a game that has no rules. Even if a
country turns itself into a terrorist element, as the Americans are now in the
process of doing, it will not necessarily be able to achieve success.

Be that as it may, if all terrorists confined their operations simply to the
traditional approach of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, and plane
hijackings, this would represent less than the maximum degree of terror.
What really strikes terror into people’s hearts is the rendezvous of terrorists
with various types of new, high technologies that possibly will evolve into

new superweapons. We already have a hint of what the future may hold. . . .
When Aum Shinrikyo followers discharged “Sarin” poison gas in a Tokyo
subway, the casualties resulting from the poison gas accounted for just a
small portion of the terror. This affair put people on notice that modern
biochemical technology had already forged a lethal weapon for those
terrorists who would try to carry out the mass destruction of humanity. . . .
[Other terrorist groups] specialize in breaking into the computer networks of
banks and news organizations, stealing stored data, deleting programs, and
disseminating disinformation. . . . This type of terrorist operation uses the
latest technology in the most current fields of study, and sets itself against
humanity as a whole. We might well call this type of operation “new terror
war.”

Ecological War: This refers to a new type of non-military warfare in
which modern technology is employed to influence the natural state of
rivers, oceans, the crust of the earth, the polar ice sheets, the air circulating
in the atmosphere, and the ozone layer. By methods such as causing
earthquakes and altering precipitation patterns, the atmospheric
temperature, the composition of the atmosphere, sea level height, and
sunshine patterns, the earth’s physical environment is damaged, or an
alternate local ecology is created. Perhaps before very long, a man-made
El Nino or La Nina effect will become yet another kind of superweapon in
the hands of certain nations and/or non-state organizations. It is more likely
that a non-state organization will become the prime initiator of ecological
war, because of its terrorist nature, because it feels it has no responsibility
to the people or to the society at large, and because non-state organizations
have consistently demonstrated that they [are] unwilling to play by the rules
of the game. Moreover, since the global ecological environment will
frequently be on the borderline of catastrophe as nations strive for the most
rapid development possible, there is a real danger that the slightest
increase or decrease in any variable would be enough to touch off an
ecological holocaust.

Again, I have to note how savvy the colonels were about terrorism and
their reference to Osama bin Laden, more than two years before 9/11. They

understood that traditional militaries—including the world’s sole remaining
superpower—were unprepared for a fight against terrorists willing to ignore
international laws and norms of combat. They saw that the politics and
bureaucracy of the United States would make it very hard to identify and
stop terrorists who engaged in unrestricted warfare. The metaphor of “using
a sledgehammer to kill an ant” is a depressing but not inaccurate way to
describe the Bush administration’s War on Terror.

The authors also understood that a successful plane hijacking or
biochemical attack would have repercussions far beyond the actual number
of casualties, as could cyberattacks that wipe out bank accounts or disrupt
electrical grids. It’s not that they were suggesting these specific tactics to
the CCP, but they were taking an inventory of all the possible options for
unconventional warfare. This ruthless inventory of options must concern
our national security types, especially after the extended crisis caused by
the coronavirus—or are we too fixated to recognize the kind of
opportunities the CCP would eagerly exploit?

The next part, about ecological warfare, sounded crazy to me when I
first encountered UW. Yet twenty years later, we have a much clearer
picture of the long-term threat of climate change and China’s role in making
it worse. The CCP leads the world in emissions of carbon dioxide, which is
heating up the planet at increasing speed.[*] China is also the worst offender
in overfishing the oceans in its never-ending quest to feed its massive
population.[*] As with every other subject the CCP comments on, we can’t
believe a word about China’s intent to fight climate change, despite its
signing of the Paris Agreement. For instance, China has been going full
speed ahead on fracking.[*]

Nevertheless, climate activists like Greta Thunberg never seem to
criticize China for its role in widespread ecological devastation over the
past two decades. Instead, they tend to focus on the sins of the West and
often fall for misinformation about China’s efforts to go green. These
misinformation campaigns, launched by the CCP and amplified by climate
activists and international organizations like the UN, are an example of
information warfare intersecting with ecological warfare. The UN also

looks the other way in part because of the CCP’s widespread graft and
influence efforts against its bureaucrats.

Meanwhile, Americans accept damaging restrictions to their economy
for the sake of climate change, accelerating widespread job losses as “dirty”
manufacturing jobs continue to move offshore—often to China, where
companies can pollute with little or no restriction. And American politicians
want to ban fracking, even though the dangers of the process are
exaggerated and it has helped drive our cost of natural gas to the lowest in
the world.[*]

I’m not sure that a man-made El Niño climate effect is likely, but
China’s use of climate change as yet another opportunity to deceive and
manipulate the West is deeply disturbing.

MORE TYPES OF NONMILITARY WARFARE

Aside from what we have discussed above, we can point out a number of
other means and methods used to fight a non-military war, some of which
already exist and some of which may exist in the future. Such means and
methods include:

Psychological warfare (spreading rumors to intimidate the enemy and
break his will)
Smuggling warfare (throwing markets into confusion and attacking
economic order)
Media warfare (manipulating what people see and hear in order to
lead public opinion)
Drug warfare (obtaining sudden and huge illicit profits by spreading
disaster in other countries)
Network warfare (venturing out in secret and concealing one’s identity
in a type of warfare that is virtually impossible to guard against)
Technological warfare (creating monopolies by setting standards
independently)

Fabrication warfare (presenting a counterfeit appearance of real
strength before the eyes of the enemy)
Resources warfare (grabbing riches by plundering stores of resources)
Economic aid warfare (bestowing favor in the open and contriving to
control matters in secret)
Cultural warfare (leading cultural trends along in order to assimilate
those with different views)
International law warfare (seizing the earliest opportunity to set up
regulations)

In addition, there are other types of non-military warfare which are too
numerous to mention. In this age, when the plethora of new technologies
can in turn give rise to a plethora of new means and methods of fighting
war, (not to mention the cross-combining and creative use of these means
and methods), it would simply be senseless and a waste of effort to list all of
the means and methods one by one. . . . Faced with a nearly infinitely
diverse array of options to choose from, why do people want to enmesh
themselves in a web of their own making and select and use means of
warfare that are limited to the realm of the force of arms and military
power? Methods that are not characterized by the use of the force of arms,
nor by the use of military power, nor even by the presence of casualties and
bloodshed, are just as likely to facilitate the successful realization of the
war’s goals, if not more so. . . . This prospect has led to revision of the
statement that “war is politics with bloodshed,” and in turn has also led to
a change in the hitherto set view that warfare through force of arms is the
ultimate means of resolving conflict. . . .

The enlargement of the concept of warfare has, in turn, resulted in
enlargement of the realm of war-related activities. . . . Any war that breaks
out tomorrow or further down the road will be characterized by warfare in
the broad sense—a cocktail mixture of warfare prosecuted through the force
of arms and warfare prosecuted by means other than the force of arms.

The goal of this kind of warfare will encompass more than merely
“using means that involve the force of arms to force the enemy to accept

one’s own will.” Rather, the goal should be “to use all means whatsoever—
means that involve military power and means that do not involve military
power, means that entail casualties and means that do not entail casualties
—to force the enemy to serve one’s own interests.”

This section concludes the chapter by showing how creative the
colonels were in their vision of unrestricted warfare. The CCP has used
virtually all of their nonmilitary tactics at one time or another, even the ones
you’ve probably never heard of.

Smuggling warfare? Chinese transshipments—the practice of moving
cargo to a third party country to evade tariffs or other regulations—are
undermining U.S. trade policies that aim to prevent China from dumping
cheap products on our markets.[*]

Media warfare? The CCP has pursued an aggressive campaign to
influence Hollywood’s depictions of China. “China is the number two
biggest movie-going country in the world. So, it’s only natural for
American movie makers to try to please the cultural gate-keepers of the
Chinese government. They’ve been doing it for years.”[*]

Drug warfare? The CCP has smuggled fentanyl, among other drugs,
into the United States. “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has
identified China as the primary source of illicit fentanyl and the painkiller’s
analogues that enter our country. Drug traffickers use two primary
techniques for delivering fentanyl manufactured in China: It is either
shipped directly into the U.S. via international mail or shipped into Mexico
to be smuggled into America.”[*]

Network warfare? The Justice Department has charged China with
cyberattacks against more than one hundred American companies. “The
Department of Justice has used every tool available to disrupt the illegal
computer intrusions and cyberattacks by these Chinese citizens,” then
Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen told The Wall Street Journal in
September 2020. “Regrettably, the Chinese Communist Party has chosen a
different path of making China safe for cybercriminals so long as they
attack computers outside China and steal intellectual property helpful to
China.”[*]

Tech warfare? China is trying to dominate international standards for
the 5G wireless networks. “The US-China competition is essentially about
who will control the global information technology infrastructure and
standards,” said Frank Rose, a military analyst and former assistant
secretary of state for arms control, in May 2020. “I think an argument can
be made that in the 21st century, whoever controls the information
infrastructure will dominate the world.”[*]

Resources warfare? China has been trying to dominate the market for
increasingly essential rare earth metals. According to The Detroit News in
November 2020, “China now supplies 80% of the rare earth metals used in
the United States, partly because it follows lower environmental protection
standards than the United States and other advanced countries. Beijing is
also expanding its stunning lead in the lithium-ion battery industry. China
has increased the number of planned battery mega-factories to 107, with 53
now active and in production. In contrast, the U.S. has only nine battery
mega-factories in the pipeline. The future of America’s auto industry—and
the millions of jobs it supports—hangs in the balance.”[*]

Economic aid warfare? That’s an accurate term for China’s Belt and
Road Initiative, designed to “forge closer ties, deepen cooperation and
expand the development space in the Eurasian region.” In other words, it’s a
way to lock in the loyalty of countries in that region through seemingly
generous economic aid.[*]

International law warfare? According to The Heritage Foundation,
“Legal warfare is one of the key instruments of psychological and public
opinion/media warfare. It raises doubts among adversary and neutral
military and civilian authorities, as well as the broader population, about the
legality of adversary actions, thereby diminishing political will and support
—and potentially retarding military activity. It also provides material for
public opinion/media warfare.”[*]

As we saw in the introduction with COVID-19, China has gotten good
at combining these and other tactics for maximum impact, including media
warfare, disinformation, and a reckless disregard for the health and safety of
innocent civilians around the world.

When I first encountered UW two decades ago, I couldn’t believe that
these PLA colonels were describing all these kinds of “war” in a literal
rather than a metaphoric sense. Like the Pentagon’s top brass, I failed to
take this kind of language seriously while I focused on getting better and
better at conventional warfare. But these kinds of war are as serious and as
deadly as any of us can imagine. Every day that we fail to prepare for these
unconventional attacks is another day that slowly erodes the vitality of our
nation.

CHAPTER 6

DESERT STORM: A MILITARY
MASTERPIECE

THE COLONELS’ CASE STUDY OF THE FIRST GULF WAR IS ESSEN
their thinking. It was much studied at many levels of the Chinese
government and military throughout the 1990s. But it was Qiao and Wang
who drew out a complex series of lessons that we see reflected in Beijing’s
strategic thinking to this date.

In the view of the colonels, Operation Desert Storm was something of a
pyrrhic victory. Brilliant win. Wrong lessons. This chapter is the most
insightful analysis of that war that I’ve ever seen. Qiao and Wang
understand the after-action analysis of that war—for good and bad—better
than our own military analysts. They take a deep and sophisticated dive into
the factors that underlay the U.S. success, displaying a thorough
understanding of things like the U.S. command structure and how recent
reforms streamlined decision-making. They have done their homework.

They admire the diplomatic foundation that helped establish both the
legitimacy of the war and the broad coalition of countries that helped the
United States. China learned the value of infiltrating international
organizations. Similarly, the large role of the media, especially twenty-four-
hour global cable television, in shaping the war has led to the CCP’s
obsession with controlling its own media and shutting out the rest of the

world. As the colonels write, We might as well say that, intentionally or
otherwise, the U.S. military and the Western media joined hands to form a
noose to hang Saddam’s Iraq from the gallows.

But they argue that the rapid victory based on many tech weapons built
an assumption that all future wars would be so easy.

It’s important to remember that while Unrestricted War includes many
new definitions of war, it does not exclude the old forms of war: The
colonels’ point is not either/or; it is “all of the above.” This dissection of a
kinetic war may be most useful as we start to think about Taiwan and the
increasingly strident rhetoric about reunification coming from Xi Jinping
and his comrades.

Everything the colonels write would suggest a full-scale military
invasion is the last thing the Chinese want—yet might be the last thing they
do. But in the meantime, we should expect an endless series of feints and
provocations, propaganda campaigns, political and financial coercions. We
need a carefully crafted policy to understand and blunt those aggressions.

From Chapter 3 of Unrestricted Warfare

A CLASSIC WAR

Perhaps because victory [in the Gulf War] was achieved so easily, to this
day there are very few people in Uncle Sam’s wildly jubilant group that
have accurately evaluated the significance of the war. Some hotheads used
this to ceaselessly fabricate the myth that the United States was invincible,
while some who could still be considered cool-headed—most of whom were
commentators and generals unable to take part in “Desert Storm” in a
complex and subtle frame of mind—believed that “Desert Storm” was not a
typical war, and that a war conducted under such ideal conditions cannot
serve as a model. . . . We have no intention of helping the Americans create
a myth, but when “Desert Storm” unfolded and concluded for all to see,
with its many combatant countries, enormous scale, short duration, small
number of casualties, and glorious results startling the whole world, who
could say that a classic war heralding the arrival of warfare in the age of
technical integration-globalization had not opened wide the main front
door to the mysterious and strange history of warfare. . . .

When we attempt to use wars that have already occurred to discuss
what constitutes war in the age of technical integration-globalization, only
“Desert Storm” can provide ready-made examples. At present, in any sense
it is still not just the only [example], but the classic [example], and
therefore it is the only “apple” that is worthy of our close analysis. . . .

The colonels start by correctly noting the many noteworthy elements—
military, diplomatic, technological, and media driven—that came together
in a unique way. In some respects, Desert Storm was a harbinger of future
international conflicts, including the use of unrestricted warfare. But in
other ways it was a unique moment in history that will never come close to
being repeated. The authors call it “an apple with numerous sections” that
can be studied only by pulling the sections apart.

It’s also a “classic war” because it applied cutting-edge technology to
classic Western military strategy. The success of America’s superior
technology against the well-equipped Iraqi forces—including the amazing
power of our satellite-guided navigation systems and precision laser-guided
weapons delivered from stealth aircraft—renewed American interest in the
theory of the Revolution in Military Affairs in the 1990s and 2000s. RMA
suggested that we should focus our efforts and resources on maintaining
and extending our technological superiority as the key to a strong national
defense. Unfortunately, RMA proved to be the completely wrong response
to the soon-to-emerge Chinese strategy of unrestricted warfare.
Nonetheless, this idea of using Silicon Valley to make killing more efficient
continues to prevail.

THE “OVERNIGHT” ALLIANCE

From Saddam’s perspective, annexing Kuwait seemed more like a
household matter in the extended Arab family compared to the taking of
American hostages during the Iranian revolution, and besides, he had given
notice ahead of time. However, he overlooked the differences between the
two. When Iran took the hostages, it was certainly a slap in the Americans’
face, but Iraq had seized the entire West by the throat. Lifelines are
naturally more important than face, and the United States had no choice
but to take it seriously, while other countries which felt threatened by Iraq
also had to take it seriously. In their alliance with the United States, what
most of the Arab countries had in mind was rooting out the Islamic heresy
represented by Saddam to keep him from damaging their own interests were
he to grow stronger unopposed, and it is very difficult to really say that they
wanted to extend justice to Kuwait.

The common concerns about their interests enabled the United States to
weave an allied network to catch Iraq very quickly. . . . Numerous countries
volunteered to be responsible nodes in this alliance network. Although they
were unwilling, Germany and Japan finally seemed actually happy to open
their purses, and what was more important than providing money was that

neither of them lost the opportunity to send their own military personnel,
thereby taking a stealthy and symbolic step toward again becoming global
powers. Egypt persuaded Libya and Jordan to be neutral in the war and no
longer support Iraq, so that Saddam became thoroughly isolated. Even
Gorbachev, who wanted to get the Americans’ support for his weak position
domestically, ultimately tacitly recognized the military strikes of the
multinational forces against his old ally.

Even powers such as the United States must similarly rely on the
support of its allies, and this support was primarily manifested in providing
legitimacy for its actions and in logistical support, not in adding so many
troops. The reason that President Bush’s policies were able to get
widespread approval from the American public was to a great extent due to
the fact that he had established an international alliance, thereby getting
the people to believe that this was not a case of pulling someone else’s
chestnuts out of the fire, and it was not just the Americans who were
funding the war and preparing to have their blood spilled. They went so far
as to send the VII Corps from Germany to Saudi Arabia, mobilizing 465
trains, 312 barges, and 119 fleets from four NATO countries. At the same
time, Japan also provided the electronics parts urgently needed by U.S.
military equipment, and this further demonstrated the increasing reliance of
the United States on its allies. In the new age, “going it alone” is not only
unwise, it is also not a realistic option. . . . From the Security Council’s
Resolution 660 calling for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait to Resolution 678
which authorized the member countries to take any actions, international
society broadly identified itself with the alliance which was temporarily
cobbled together. One hundred and ten countries took part in the embargo
against Iraq, and more than 30 countries took part in the use of force,
including numerous Arab countries! Obviously, every country had fully
estimated where its interests were prior to this action.

The full-scale intervention of the United Nations was not sufficient to
make it possible for this fragile and spider-web like alliance, which was
formed in a very short period of time, to easily withstand the impact of a
war. It can be said that, as far as the politicians were concerned, the